Renaissance Head of a woman from the Loire valley

This head sculpted in tufa stone was probably made between Anjou and Touraine, land of extraction of this limestone which marks the identity of the architectural and sculpted productions of the Loire Valley. The sculptor has worked here to give substance to an ideal, that of feminine beauty around the 1500s as depicted by the most famous illuminators of the time. We thus find in the Grandes Heures d'Anne de Bretagne or even in the leaves of the Hours of Louis XII by Jean Bourdichon the same female faces, full, of an absolute oval, marked by almond eyes surmounted by two eyebrows draw as perfect arcades. As on our sculpture, the nose is straight, fine, the mouth small. Slightly insidious, the latter breathes a moving sense of life into our sculpture, giving the model an expression very close to those adopted on a young woman's head made around 1500 and kept today in the collections of the Châlons-en- Champagne museum.